Robbing the Jews reveals the mechanisms by which the Nazis and their allies confiscated Jewish property; the book demonstrates the close relationship between robbery and the Holocaust. The spoliation evolved in intensifying steps. The Anschluss and Kristallnacht in 1938 reveal a dynamic tension between pressure from below and state-directed measures. In Western Europe, the economic persecution of the Jews took the form of legal decrees and administrative measures. In Eastern Europe, authoritarian governments adopted the Nazi program that excluded Jews from the economy and seized their property, based on indigenous antisemitism and plans for ethnically homogenous nation-states. In the occupied East, property was collected at the killing sites – the most valuable objects were sent to Berlin, whereas items of lesser value supported the local administration and rewarded collaborators. At several key junctures, robbery acted as a catalyst for genocide, accelerating the progression from pogrom to mass murder.

« Martin Dean’s book is the first and fully comprehensive study on the confiscation of Jewish property in the Holocaust and will set the standard for future research and analysis. In the complicated field of robbing and spoliation it connects important archival findings with a masterly knowledge of even remote research literature, cogently integrating the process of confiscation into the general history of the Holocaust. »
— Frank Bajohr, Research Center for Contemporary History in Hamburg, Germany

« Few, if any scholars in the English-speaking world, can equal Martin Dean’s record of intense study of the most appalling primary sources generated by the most thorough and most minutely recorded genocide in human history…. Dean looks at all the ways that the German state stole Jewish property and shows the importance of hitherto neglected ones…. The horrible stories of pauperization and humiliation of the Jews under the Nazis make almost unbearable reading precisely because they are so real, so ordinary, and so terrible. »
— Jonathan Steinberg, University of Pennsylvania

Table of Contents

List of Photos

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I. Economic Persecution inside the Third Reich, 1933–1941

1.

The Nazis’ Initial Confiscation Measures

2.

Mounting Obstacles to Jewish Emigration, 1933–1939

3.

The Anschluss and Kristallnacht: Accelerating Aryanization and Confiscation in Austria and Germany, 1938–1939

Destruction and Plunder in the Occupied East: Poland, the Soviet Union, and Serbia

6.

Settling Accounts in the Wake of the Deportations

7.

‘Plunder by Decree’: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in German-Occupied Western Europe

8.

Sovereign Imitations: Confiscations by States Allied to Nazi Germany

9.

Receiving Stolen Property: Neutral States and Private Companies

10.

Seizure of Property and the Social Dynamics of the Holocaust

Archival Sources and Bibliography

Index

Martin Dean is an Applied Research Scholar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. The recipient of a Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellowship from the same institution in 1997, he also has held a DAAD grant. Martin Dean earned his PhD at Cambridge University, and subsequently served as Senior Historian for the Metropolitan Police War Crimes Unit in London, served as Staff Historian for the Australian Special Investigations Unit, and has acted as an expert witness in Nazi war crimes cases in Australia and Germany. Among his previous publications are Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941-1944, and as co-editor, Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe (both published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), as well as many articles.